Google Buzz and the Five Principles of Designing For Meaning

Google Buzz: revolution, evolution, or devolution? Many of you have asked me for my take. So here’s how it stacks up against my five next-generation product & service design principles — the principles of “design for meaning.”

The Hippocrates Concept. WWHD? It’s the most fundamental question every next-gen product and service designer should ask: “what would Hippocrates do?” His goal was for physicians to “first, do no harm” — and in the 21st century, we’re learning the hard way just how much economic harm toxic products and services can do. WWHD? Would Hippocrates pass or fail your stuff? He might just fail Buzz, because it’s got privacyissues. Use it unwittingly, and your email address — or those of your followers — might be revealed. That’s because you had to opt out of public default settings, instead of opting in. Bad news for most, but especially bad news for, say, a Chinese free speech activist. Without limiting harm, no product or service can maximize the creation of authentic economic value.

Simplify, don’t rely. Does Buzz reveal your email? Does it reveal your followers’ emails? Only under specific conditions? Google’s working hard to fix the issue, but its fixes still rely on people “following instructions”. In the real world, almost no users follow instructions. If it’s that complicated, you might have just already failed. Nobody wants to spend an hour figuring whether a service might just do no harm — or tweaking it to do no harm.

Failure, not features. Next-gen products and services are built to fail, fast and cheap — instead of just offering tons of features. The flip side of bundling features together is that room to fail gracefully disappears, because interdependencies between them spiral out of control. It’s why Microsoft always made sucky stuff: bundling Windows, Office, and sundry other apps into one giant monolith increased improvement costs radically. Once upon a time, Google laid down the law: we’ll never bundle stuff the way Microsoft does — because that’s evil. But Buzz is bundled with Gmail so tightly, it’s the first thing you see beneath your inbox. Buzz makes it more costly to improve Gmail, and vice versa. Better that each was an independent service.

Purpose, not product. The flip side of “do no harm” is offering utility gains of 10, 100, or 1000x in a given domain or activity. Yet when I click on Buzz, it’s like being punched in the face with a giant fist of information. It aggregates tremendous amounts of stuff — but instead of simplifying it, it simply stitches everything together. I’m not sure what gains that offers me. It feels a little bit like Buzz was the product of raw engineering talent, designed without a purpose in mind. “Because we can” does not equal “because it matters.”

Generosity, not greed (please note – Josh, part of the Buzz team, points out in the comments that a more generous Buzz is forthcoming). Buzz is “selfish.” Through it, I can read stuff published elsewhere, like Twitter — but I can’t write elsewhere. That’s “strategy” built into product: the goal is merely to commoditize rival platforms, and turn them into “plumbing.” That’s so 20th century, it hurts. Generous products and services give back, creating thriving ecosystems where everyone can win. Here, a generous service would read and write across all platforms. That way, you wouldn’t have to keep both Twitter and Buzz open at once: the incentives would be for the best — not just the biggest — platform to succeed. The way Buzz is currently set up, a Microsoftian outcome is likely: Buzz succeeds due to scale, but only at the expense of a thriving, vibrant new industry.

Tomorrow’s products and services have to be designed not just for mere consumption, but “designed for meaning“: they must yield lasting, shared, meaningful economic gains — or else. Or else we continue our voyage into a no-future future. That’s the big picture that tomorrow’s radical innovators must redraw. I think Google Buzz is actually really, really cool — it’s just not yet a meaningful service. It lives in the shadow of yesterday’s big picture, instead of redrawing it. Redrawing the big picture of prosperity, by going from Great to Good: that’s today’s fundamental challenge.

My five principles aren’t the only ones, and they’re certainly far from the best ones — fire away in the comments with your own principles, thoughts about Buzz, or more examples.

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